The Life and Death of Benjamin Barker
by SimplyElymas
Summary: On the twenty third of August, 1801, a child was born to Henry Barker and his older sister. Due to inbreeding, the child had a right arm longer than his left, and his father found it funny to name him Benjamin, meaning son of my right hand.
1. Prologue: Habeas Corpus

**The Life and Death of Benjamin Barker**

_By SimplyElymas_

**Author's Note**

I'm amazed by the quality of the writing in the Sweeney fandom, so my offering is most humble. I'm heavily influenced by the ST revival, but one never knows. I certainly will not be using the asylum idea, which I do love, and has been fictionalized brilliantly, but does not fit my story. If you're curious about my style, it's heavily influenced by both Susanna Clarke and Neil Gaiman. As far as Sweeney goes, I think my writing in the area has been influenced by azurelacroix and BellaSpirita. (If you haven't read their stories, The Epilogue and Death and the Lady, let me tell you something: You're a complete idiot. I was a complete idiot myself until a few months ago, so don't worry. Just read them.)

**Disclaimer**

I am not, in fact, Christopher Bond, Stephen Sondheim, John Doyle, or any of those nice people. (I'm also not Madonna, Fabio, Barbara Bush, or Michael Crawford. You know, just for the record.)

* * *

**Prologue: Habeas Corpus**

_Well, naturally, my old friend, but they haven't a body. No one can prove anything without a body._

**Mr. Henry Barker, in conversation.**

_But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable_

**- E. M. Forster**

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

* * *

On a cold February morning in 1846, the body of a man was found, throat slit, in the bake house of Lovett's World Famous Meat Pies, Fleet Street, London. He was very pale, and completely clean shaven. His red hair was neatly trimmed in the current style, but mussed as though he had been in a fight, and streaked through with gray.

A necklace of delicate blood droplets dripped down his throat, pooling like a jewel in the hollow of his collarbone. His thin, colorless lips were slack, revealing well kept teeth and a wet, red mouth, like a cavern. He wore a fine linen shirt and meticulously washed trousers. When the man was stripped, it revealed a tight, solid body, growing somewhat soft about the middle, with an extraordinarily muscled right arm, noticeably longer than his left. Aside from his head, the man was completely hairless.

Beside him were found the weapons used to kill him – two straight razors with handles of silver. The blades were sharpened to what could only, ironically, be called a razor's edge. They were coated thickly with dried blood. There were no signs that the man had fought for his life. Indeed, on his dead face there seemed almost to be a disquieting smile of relief.

The only thing of value found on the body was a small black ring edged in gold, placed meticulously upon the man's left little finger. Engraved on it in nickel were the words, "From Mr. Barker to Mrs. Barker. Love, Benjamin."

While all evidence found at the scene of the crime pointed seemed to indicate that the man was Benjamin Barker, each and every witness brought in could not help but identify him as the preferred Fleet Street barber and Mrs. Lovett's fiancé, a Mr. Sweeney Todd.


	2. Chapter One: The Caul

**Chapter One: The Caul**

**Disclaimer**

I have not turned into Sondheim since the prologue.

**Author's Note**

The legend of the caul is a heckuva interesting business. If you want to research it, wikipedia is your God, but any information on it may contain sort of spoilers for this story.

_Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped._

**Sam Levenson **

_Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought his birth. _

**John Milton**

In the middle of the birthing, the midwife heard an unfamiliar gasping. It began as an infantile sound, like a drowning child, but slowly she heard the rasp cascade into something more adult and desperate. It was the dying rattle of man whose throat was cut, like someone screaming underwater.

_Oh, _she thought pensively, wiping sweat from the mother's brow, _this one won't make it alive. Pity, poor mite. His mother – whatsit, Alice – was really a dear. Pity about the father. Pity about the girl._

In the unforgiving light of the candle, Alice did not look dear. She looked young, and gaunt, and lost in her own private miasma of pain. Her face was twisted in terrible lines. She did not look human. Her blonde hair lay in streaks over her sweaty face, and as she cried out without sound, shrieking like wild thing, she resembled nothing so much as a fox caught in a trap.

_Poor thing_, thought the midwife once more, _and then once more to lose herself in the secret old gray counry called grief. She's far too young._

But the midwife was wrong. Young as Aliec Ford might be, and she was not less than twenty-five, withered as she was by worry, she was far older than the infant dying of suffocation as the midwife meditated. And now there was a new sound. The free, hissing sound of something drawing breath. In the dark, painful silence, the baby began to cry.

It was an agonized wail. The midwife's face, half delighted, half terrified, was only slightly lit by the single candle, her cheeks inky caverns. She opened old, cracked lips, threaded with shadowy membranes, and intoned, priest like, "The baby was born with a caul."

"A caul?" These words from the horrified mother were practically a supplication to take the dreadful, mewling thing that cried out so with pain, that had issued from the awful odorous cleft between her legs, away.

"A caul. He took a part of you as he left, right enough. It was near to killed him. But he ripped the caul from his little head, didn't he. A strong boy. It _is_ a boy." The midwife held it up.

It did not look like a boy. It did not look like a baby. Its sallow, pale face was washed out by its shock of red hair. Babies were not supposed to have such thick hair. The baby thing kept crying, mewling with all the difficulties of the world.

"La, Mrs. B.," sing songed the midwife, taking the thing and holding him on her knees, "he's a strong boy, and born with a caul. The thing's squalling played an odd harmony to her sing song speech. "Do you know what that means, Mrs. B.? Do you?"

Alice did not bother to correct the surname mistake. "No," she managed.

"It means he'll grow up to be a saint."

* * *

A child was born on the twenty-third of August, 1801, to Mrs. Alice Ford, the eldest sister of the father, Mr. Henry Barker. The family, in an understandable desire to keep this quiet, did not announce the birth. The inbreeding seemed to have no ill effects upon the child, but for his arms, the right of which was longer than the other.

In a fit of irony Henry had named the child Benjamin. This, he was told by an old Jewish acquaintance, meant, "son of my right hand."

Henry Barker thought this terribly amusing. This most likely explains a great deal about Henry Barker.

* * *

The first thing Benjamin Barker remembered was the factory. He never learned what the factory made, or the names of any of the workers he watched so avidly. But the first thing he remembered was the sight of the sooty, thin faces of the factory's wraiths, filing out, shoes stuffed with rags. They did not seem to possess gender or identity, only a vast sea of depravity and lifeless life. The people were personless. They were nonexistent to most. They were "its."

Later, Benjamin would not recall that he has watched his scene from his cradle, out the ashy window, through the foggy L,ondon air. Nor would he remember the name of the factory, Turpin's Fine Silk, or remark that it was the same factory where he would work his fingers to the bone from the ages of thirteen to sixteen. He would only remember the factory as an ageless, anonymous nightmare of gaunt, pale faces, genderless and joyous, begging him for help. It was help he could not offer, he know from the cradle, as the factory haunted his dreams through adolesence and adulthood. He could not stoop to them, because to do so would be to become one of their number.

He could not be that, he was determined from childhood, watching the factory, watching the Industrial Revolution out of transparent, pallid eyes. He could not be one of the nameless, lifeless creatures screaming for bread. But perhaps he might fight _for_ them. Watching the factory, a tiny cold rage against injustice was born in Benjamin Barker. Someday, he promised himself, he would be the one to administer that divine justice.

Like most perverted fantasies, this was perversely true.


End file.
